EXPOSED: Media’s Anti-Trump Propaganda Machine, By the Numbers

Robert Gehl reports that a new Harvard study confirms what we already knew: there is rampant anti-Trump bias in the media.

It’s so bad, in fact, that at most major outlets, more than 90 percent of all the coverage is negative.

At CNN the coverage was 93 percent negative, at NBC it was 93 percent, and at CBS it was 91 percent.

The only thing close to “balanced” news was over at Fox News, and there, the coverage was still 52 percent negative.

The study – called “News Coverage of Donald Trump’s First 100 Days” – was done by Harvard’s Kennedy School Shroenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. To determine the percentages, the school obtained data from a group called Media Tenor, which codes media according to topic, source, and tone. They analyzed the top shows, like CNN’s Situation Room, CBS Evening News, Fox’s Special Report, and NBC Nightly News. It did not analyze the talk show coverage. They also covered newspapers.

The three major print media, the New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, were slightly more balanced than their broadcast counterparts, The Daily Caller reports.

The Journal was the most balanced, but still had 70 percent negative coverage.

The topic that received the most balanced coverage was the economy at 54 percent negative. Terrorism received 70 percent negative coverage.

Another major part of Harvard’s study compared Trump’s coverage to that of the three previous presidents, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.

“The media needs different narrative frames – not just an antagonistic one,” Nicco Mele, director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “But it is important to realize this is not just about Trump. The media’s overwhelmingly negative coverage of Trump speaks to a bias for negative coverage.”

The media needs different voices. The only person the media quotes in its coverage of Trump is Trump. He is quoted 64 percent of the time. Democrats get only 6 percent of the quotes; other Republicans just 4 percent. What’s truly atypical about Trump’s coverage is that it’s sharply negative despite the fact that he’s the source of nearly two-thirds of the sound bites surrounding his coverage.